How do you know when a partner is NOT a good fit for your program?

When they breach your code of conduct that they've signed before joining your partner program. It is important to make performance expectations clear out of the gate, and a code of conduct does just that in an objective way. It is critical to have this part formalized as you need something to fallback on if you are going to remove them from a program they may be currently deriving benefits from. From my experience, the majority of the code of conduct is written based on ensuring they are acting in a way that represents your own company's values when dealing with customers.

In an ideal case - the partners you choose/find are great fit for your program overall (with similar categories/ranking to Daniel's message). However I think that you will also find that some partners are fantastic fits for your program but just for specific departments (e.g. a partner which is fantastic for on and offline marketing events but not ideal for co-selling with your sales reps).

If you've heard of the 4 C's of buying diamonds (cut, color, clarity, carat), then let me share with you the 4 C's of picking the right partner. If you don't have a good stone or a good partner it's not the end of the world, but you should know going in that you may not have the best fit. Here are the 4 things I look for, and how I score new potential partners: 1. Culture - do you have strong alignment with the mission, vision and values of your organizations and of your teams? Do you feel good about putting this partner in front of your customers and vice versa? 2. Capacity - what capacity and resources do you have on each side to commit to partner? This could be in the form of sales, engineering, marketing, exec sponsorship and more. 3. Commitment - What is the desire and interest to work together driven by? Is this a single deal, or a chance to do 100 or 1000 deals or projects together? 4. Competencies - what do they know about your company, customers, technologies and platform? If they don't score highly then maybe the right answer is that you have to say no now or know when you would like to get back together as business and priorities and programs can change.